Category Archives: Honorary Mutts

Apparently, mild-mannered This American Life host Ira Glass owns an attack dog, and you can hear all about it on this episode.

It’s a humorous story, though one that seems all too familiar. We’re talking about owners who go to great lengths to give their dogs the best care possible — in this case, that means importing kangaroo meat for the dog’s food — but probably causing the dog great anxiety in the meantime.

Piney, the Glass’s adopted pitbull, has a number of health issues as well as behavioral issues. He’s a fear biter and has auto-immune issues, and basically sounds like a neurotic mess. And whenever I hear about a dog like this — an anxious dog — I assume the owners are behind it. In this case, they got Piney as a puppy. Read the rest of this entry →

Really pitbulls are the ultimate mutts, but if you didn’t already believe they get a bad rap, allow us to introduce you to Lilly.

According to MyFoxBoston, 8-year-old Lilly rescued her unconscious owner from the path of freight train…much to her own detriment:

Spain was not injured, but Lilly suffered a complete “de-gloving” of her right foot: all of the muscle and skin were gone. Her pelvis was fractured in multiple locations and she suffered other internal injuries. But even as first police and firefighters arrived at the scene, Lilly stayed by her owner’s side.

Lilly ended up having one of her legs amputated, and surgery on her pelvis.

When I was a kid I read a book about a girl whose dog — which had saved her life on more than one occasion — was starting to go blind. The dog was used to roaming the neighborhood on his own and she couldn’t bare to keep him cooped up in his old age. So she got him a seeing-eye-dog. It seemed far-fetched, even then. But now I see true stories like this where one dog is starting to lose its sight and it turns to a canine pal for help getting around.

This one takes things a step farther, where one rescue dog helps another with his blindness…and his seizures.

You might be tempted to look at one of these guys and think it was a Shepherd mix or part Husky, but you’d be wrong.

The Canaan dog is one of the oldest dog breeds in the world, and have existed in the area that is now Israel since the days of Moses. Perhaps one even trotted across the Red Sea with him. But these wild dogs are dwindling in the wild, and a few kennels are trying to add new life to the wild population in order to save a national treasure.

From the Washington Post:

“When they talk about dogs in the Bible, it was these,” says Myrna Shiboleth, who has done more than anyone to rescue the breed formally known as Canaan dog. “It was the same dog.”

The archaeological evidence bears it out, from 1st-century rock carvings in the Sinai to the skeletons of more than 700 dogs from the 5th century B.C. discovered south of Tel Aviv. When Jesus and Moses turned their heads to the sound of a barking dog, it was the Canaan that they saw.